You can't make everyone happy all of the time. That's what Mark Zuckerberg and his cronies seem to be saying to the 845 million Facebookers across the globe. It certainly must be tough to devise a set of user rules that don't impinge on freedom of expression while at the same time ruling out explicit content. You're bound to piss a few though here and there. (Moses can relate, but at the end of the day, not having written the Commandments himself, at least he could pass the buck.)
Banning bestiality, necrophilia and pedophilia...we all pretty much concur; what's more contentious is the rule that bans "breastfeeding photos showing other nudity, or nipple clearly exposed." (NB: If Moses were still around, he could happily have posted an image of his own nipple with no repercussions.)
That's like saying you can show pictures of a person eating without showing lips or teeth. In the absence of a Hooter Hider, it's pretty hard to disguise the nipple of a breastfeeder. But asking moms to do so suggests that the nipple itself is somehow obscene, rather than perfunctory.
What Facebook is effectively doing is reinforcing the idea that breastfeeding is an act to be done behind closed doors, that there is some inherent shame in it.
No sense denying it, Facebook is practically a religion, and as such it must take its cultural influence seriously. A daunting task, for sure, but it's up to users to tell the high and mighties whenever they get it wrong. And they have.
The cheeky Guardian is running a social experiment of its own. Email the UK newspaper your nipple-accessorised breastfeeding photos, and it promises to fearlessly post them on its Facebook page, to see whether Zuckerberg & Co removes them.
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